Stop and Smell the Cheese; It's Part of the Tradition

By ALEX WITCHEL

Published: June 16, 2004

''NO wait?'' Mike Quigley, a pilot for Delta Air Lines, couldn't believe his luck on a recent rainy Sunday at DiPalo's Fine Foods. This Italian cheese shop, owned by the same family since 1925, usually has lines reaching out onto the sidewalk, even after moving from its original location at 206 Grand Street (800 square feet) all the way across the street to 200 Grand Street, at Mott (1,200 square feet).

But Mr. Quigley had hit the perfect lull. As he left with an eight-pound piece of Argentine reggianito to fly to his sister-in-law in Sacramento, a new wave of customers dripped their way inside to participate in the daily festivities that pass for shopping here. This includes accepting tastes of just about everything DiPalo's sells -- the mozzarella that is made here daily, along with the olive oils, prosciuttos and 300 varieties of cheese imported from Italy -- and more tales of the old country than you've heard since Grandma met her maker, stories about every product and the people who make them, like the pecorino Romano produced for centuries by a Roman family named Lopez.

''This cheese is from happy cows,'' said Sal DiPalo, 44, an owner, who sounds uncannily like Ray Romano, handing over a chunk of crucolo, made in the central Alps of Italy. The customer looked skeptical. ''How do you know that?'' he asked.

''Because if you woke up in the morning and had that view,'' Mr. DiPalo said, ''you'd be happy, too.''

This being New York, however, someone had to be miserable. A middle-aged woman brandishing an umbrella pushed her way through the crowd of well-behaved shoppers, most of them chewing on their cheese as contentedly as those happy cows.

Not fast enough, apparently. She pushed her way back out. Louis DiPalo had seen it before. ''Some people get annoyed, but it's not DiPalo to do it in and out,'' he said. ''If you can't wait, just say hello and leave.'' He adjusted his baseball cap. ''There's a right way, a wrong way and my way.''

Let's hear it for his way. In a city besotted by the blocklong Whole Foods in Chelsea and its gargantuan twin (60,000 square feet), which recently opened in the Time Warner Center; where the 125th Street exit to the expanded Fairway is backed up every weekend; where Citarella grows like Topsy, acquiring Rosedale Fish Market last month; and where the SoHo classic Dean & DeLuca has cloned itself all the way to Madison Avenue, DiPalo's is one of the last holdouts of a bygone era.

''We sell the product the way it was sold 100 years ago,'' Louis DiPalo said. He owns the store with Sal and their sister Maria; seven other family members work there as well. ''The store is an extension of my house, with you sharing our food at our table,'' Mr. DiPalo went on. ''We tell you about the product, what to look for. You taste it, you don't like it, that's O.K., too. We want you to learn.''

As Mr. DiPalo spoke, he stood at the back of the store where the business moved in 2002, pushing a steel paddle through an enormous bowl of milk and curd.

''I have to make one more batch of cheese, then we'll sit,'' he promised. He, Sal and another worker, Tony Camacho, are the cheese makers here. They turn out 500 to 600 pounds daily, including fresh ricotta (which is often used in their ravioli, made by a cousin in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where half the family lives -- the rest are in Bay Ridge). Besides selling their cheeses in their store, they also supply restaurants, including Babbo, Jean Georges and Peasant.

First, Mr. DiPalo grasped a thick length of mozzarella, kneading it like bread, then pulling it like taffy, then tearing off pieces that he effortlessly folded into perfect globes, dropping each one into a vat of cold water.

His mother, Viola DiPalo, 77, came to the back for a quick break. She has worked in the store since she was married in 1947; her husband, Sam DiPalo, died in 1998.

Mr. DiPalo nodded toward his mother. ''She's my best worker, you know why? At the end of the day I don't pay her.''

Mrs. DiPalo smiled. ''I take a shopping bag home,'' she said, making a ''that's enough'' gesture, before returning up front.

Finally, Mr. DiPalo put down his paddle and walked to Ferrara, a cafe on Grand Street that he calls his office. He said hello to the old women working behind the counter (''You're so handsome,'' one called out), sat down and ordered a cup of tea. He talked about his family's history in the neighborhood, starting a little more than a century ago when Savino DiPalo, his great-grandfather, settled in Little Italy in 1903.

''He was a farmer and cheese maker in Basilicata, near Puglia, in southern Italy,'' Mr. DiPalo said. ''They had a few bad years in farming, so he came here.'' By 1910 he had opened S. DiPalo, a latteria, on Mott Street. ''He got the milk from the farms above 14th Street, delivered by horse,'' Mr. DiPalo added.

In 1925, Savino's daughter Concetta and her husband, Luigi Santomauro, opened C. DiPalo at 206 Grand Street. ''My grandfather said it was too close to her father's store,'' Mr. DiPalo said. ''But at that time this community was teeming with Italian immigrants. There were so many people that my grandparents only serviced Mott Street, and only the people who came from the area in Italy that they came from -- the south. If you were from Rome, you wouldn't go into that store, you were from too far north.